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Battle of Yonkers
In World War Z, the Battle of Yonkers was the United States Military's first large scale, official engagement of the Zombie Wars. It took place in Yonkers, New York, a suburb of New York City. The battle was a complete and total catastrophe. In the book, U.S. Infantryman Todd Wainio narrates the events of the battle. In the audio book release of World War Z, Todd Wainio is portrayed by Mark Hamill. Synopsis Prelude The first zombie outbreaks of the war began in China, and quickly spread across the globe. The spread of the zombies slowed during the winter of this first year, during which time the placebo-vaccine "Phalanx" was to the public, who still thought the new plague was a new form of rabies. During this time, elite Special Forces units known as "Alpha Teams" were covertly used against the undead in isolated infestations. Although the actions carried out by the Alpha Teams are still classified, they were highly successful at eradicating these initial sporadic zombie outbreaks. With the onset of winter -- cold weather slows down zombie movement and thus their spread -- zombie outbreaks in the United States were initially contained as soon as they appeared by the Alpha Teams. These three factors combined to lull the American populace into a false sense of security: the winter cold and Alpha Teams kept small zombie outbreaks from spreading, and the fake Phalanx vaccine convinced the public that even if these reports of "reanimated corpses attacking the living" were true, there was adequate medical protection against it. Due to the media-as-big-business culture in America at the time, the result was that after several months the feeling settled in that the "situation" (whatever it was) was under control, rumors of "zombies" became yesterday's news: the mass media treated the "African Rabies" story as just another short-lived scare like SARS or anthrax, and moved on to focusing on the next big celebrity gossip story, etc. Thus the primary safeguard against falling victim to a zombie plague -- knowing that there is a zombie plague occurring -- was not in place. However, the Alpha Teams were only originally meant as a stop-gap measure until the regular army could be mobilized to full-scale war levels, an action which was never taken because many were unwilling to believe the true nature of the undead plague. With the arrival of spring came the return of warmer weather, and the zombies began far more mobile and active again. Soon they spread so far and so fast that the Alpha Teams were overwhelmed. Eventually, the number of zombies began increasing exponentially. Later that spring a female journalist in the USA publicly released the truth: that Phalanx was a placebo offering no protection against the virus whatsoever, and that the virus was re-animating dead corpses into mindless cannibals who fed on the living. This sparked the "Great Panic", when the public at large realized the situation they were faced with. The spread of the zombies quickly spiraled out of control, and New York City was overrun, as cable news networks showed video nationwide of waves of zombies pushing through the streets as civilians desperately fought hand to hand with them until the city was totally overwhelmed. The Battle of Yonkers would begin 3 months after the start of the "Great Panic", after the fall of New York City, in an attempt to destroy the zombie horde numbering in the millions which was now spreading from the city. While the special forces "Alpha Teams" had been used against select zombie infestations, Yonkers would be the first time an army of regulars had faced them. The Battle Elements of the United States Army were deployed along the Saw Mill River Parkway in North Yonkers. While the parkway served as a natural choke point (as well as the only intelligent tactic, as described by a surviving vet), it made no difference in the final result. Utilizing antiquated tactics dating back to the Cold War, positions were prepared in such ways as digging tank emplacements, building barriers out of sandbags, and in foxholes. When "Zack" first began to trickle down the freeway, the opening salvos were fired - two MLRS rocket barrages which did destroy a significant percentage of the first wave. As the undead became more tightly packed, the MLRS lost effectiveness, with the thick swarms of zombies reducing the possibility of a head wound. The second barrage came from M109 Paladin artillery stationed on a hill to the rear of the infantry. They fired fragmentation shells which had even less of an effect than the MLRS barrages. The artillery strikes depended on the "balloon effect," which by proximity to an explosion would cause the liquid in the victim's body to burst. This did not occur, however, because of the zombie's coagulated blood. Therefore, SNT (Sudden Nerve Trauma), which "just shuts down vital organs like God flickin' a light switch," did not happen either.Max Brooks, World War Z, (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) 98. After this, the infantry, armor and air support opened fire on the "river of undead". Firing on the zombies were the full military might of the United States Army: M1 Abrams tanks, M2 Bradleys, Humvees, mortars and several AH-64 Apache helicopters. All of these held sustained fire for a time in what was likened to "a meatgrinder, or a wood chipper..."Brooks 98. until the anti-personnel ammunition ran out. In fact, little of it had even been provided for the tanks. The armor and helicopters then switched over to Anti-Tank rounds like HEAT or Sabot shells which had little to no effect on the swelling tide of undead. The infantry were left fighting the undead in close proximity, and there were even zombies locked in the houses behind the front line of infantry that had been freed by the explosions. Other soldiers could see everything, through the weapon mounted cameras of the front-line soldiers (thanks to the Land Warrior system); the hordes closing in, their fellow soldiers falling and being eaten alive and even reports of zombies not dying when being shot in the head (this was however noted to have happened because the rounds grazed their heads; this would be recognized as a common sight only in later battles). F-35 fighter jets launched AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, dropping hundreds of thousands of explosive devices. This decimated the oncoming wave and resulted in a few moments of eerie silence as the dazed and confused soldiers recovered from the shock of the nearby explosions. However, soon even more zombies shuffled up the road to take their place. At that point the battle turned into utter chaos, as the soldiers on the ground saw an oncoming wave of millions more zombies emerging from the smoke clouds that had taken out the first several thousand. Satalite images from the Land Warrior system still showed a hoard of millions of zombies streaching back into Manhatten. In a notable act of desperation, Waino recounts that one helicopter gunship bravely tried to buy time for infantry on the ground to retreat by flying low towards the zombie horde with its rotary blades tipped forward; this sliced through many zombies and slowed their advance for 2 or 3 precious minutes, but then one of the helicopter's blades hit a wrecked car, causing it to crash and explode. News crews clambered over one another to get away from the coming onslaught and military personnel sought refuge anywhere they could from the zombies. The Air Force dropped several thermobaric weapons on the zombies and their own troops hoping to neutralize the undead at Yonkers in one sweep. It accomplished its purpose of destroying the majority of zombies from that battle but many more still poured in from Manhattan, overpowering the American forces and proving, to devastating effect, that the war with the undead could not be won with conventional tactics. Within 2 weeks after Yonkers, the eastern United States were abandoned by the United States military in a mass retreat to a new defensive line at the Rocky Mountains. What went wrong The Battle of Yonkers was an unmitigated disaster for the military. Public confidence in them and the United States Government was shattered, and this contributed heavily to the Great Panic that soon followed and claimed the lives of many more Americans. Tactics The tactics used by the army dated back to plans against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After years of fighting brushfire wars, the "Fulda Fucktards" (sic) who had come of age during the Cold War were overjoyed to have an opportunity to fight a conventional battle and completely ignored the new, untested nature of the undead enemy. Instead of placing infantry in positions of overwatch and in elevated areas with excellent lines of fire, the soldiers were forced to fight on the ground and were quickly overrun. The higher-ups failed to prepare for what was essentially a human wave attack, and should have had fewer men on the ground and more indirect fire units. The soldiers were also outfitted with "Land Warrior" gear which, amongst other things, provided each soldier with a radar readout of the surrounding area for miles around. This included the hordes of zombies that started coming soon after the battle began. Seeing the thousands of zombies, many soldiers lost their cool and would use the Land Warrior communication up link (this allowed each soldier to share communications) to share frantic shouts and hurried claims once they started being overrun. The soldiers used foxholes, of all things, as part of what the commanders said was a "concealment" technique (designed only for enimies that fired weapons), but popular consensus is that all the fancy equipment, foxholes and everything else was to put on to show the American people the high-tech prowess of the US military over the zombies. Another problem was that the military instruction that these soldiers had been undergoing for years had trained them to shoot at a target's center of mass (torso, because it is the most difficult to miss), and although the soldiers at Yonkers had been informed that the only way to kill a zombie was with a head shot, they had little experience with doing so and could not easily switch to aiming at a new smaller target. Equipment The soldiers were ordered to wear protective MOPP gear, (used in case of chemical or biological warfare) which greatly impairs one's ability to fight by restricting eyesight, range of motion and respiration. Waino firmly believed that putting the infantry in MOPP gear was totally unnecessary and done purely as part of the gigantic propaganda tool that Yonkers was supposed to be; re instilling morale and confidence in the government's control of the situation by showcasing all of the military's newest and most high-tech technologies (i.e. deploying several technological cutting-edge anti-vehicle tanks and weapons, even though these would be next to useless against zombies). Bulky MOPP gear made it incredibly difficult simply to reload infantry rifles, and ammunition was also in short supply as they had not accurately gauged how much shooting would be required (few of the standard infantry were expected to even actually shoot, just during mopping-up work after the artillery barrage finished off most of the zombies, but instead they all found themselves fighting for their lives). In addition, the soldiers had been made to spend an entire hot August day (one of the warmest on record) digging fox holes and entrenchments while wearing the MOPP gear, pushing them near to exhaustion. Waino's most convincing point about the MOPP gear being unnecessary and "for show" is that military officers and civilian reporters walking around along the defensive line were in no way required to wear protective gear of any kind, and had the military seriously thought the zombie virus might be airborne (which it is not) they would have required command officers and news crews to wear them as well. The Land Warrior system, which effectively connected each soldier to every other by use of video cameras, proved a fatal mistake: morale disintegrated soon after soldiers watched their brothers-in-arms being eaten alive. It also showed soldiers live satellite camera feeds showing the entire miles-long horde of several million zombies pouring out of New York City towards them, making it difficult to focus on fighting the ones immediately facing them when faced with the full magnitude of the zombie horde. The conventional anti-tank ordnance was also useless against an army of zombies, as many of the depleted uranium rounds had no effect but to fly straight through the undead and pass harmlessly to the rear of the advancing mass. The men in charge of the battle failed to properly equip their forces for anti-infantry operations; from the outset, anti-tank weaponry should have been discarded, and AFVs loaded with HEI-T (High Explosive Incendiary, Tracer) rounds. The old guard of the US military command had relied too much on their own technological superiority, not adapting to the zombie threat, or as one pilot later put it "who needs a stealth jet against an infantry-based enemy that doesn't have radar?". Press Coverage It is said that "there must have been at least one reporter for every two or three uniforms."Brooks 95. This is obviously an exaggeration, but not far from the truth: "prewar records have shown Yonkers to have the highest press-to-military ratio of any battle previously fought."Brooks 95. These news crews had been present to document the United States' decisive victory over the undead. As it turned out, however, the extreme press coverage backfired in spectacular fashion: the military command had intended for Yonkers to be a media showcase of the technological might of their forces, making sacrifices in regard to mobility and tactical deployment in order to ensure this (i.e. making infantry wear mobility-restricting MOPP gear and using advanced anti-vehicle weapons against a human-wave attack). A direct result of this was that ultimately, most of the nation watched half of the United States army killed and eaten alive by hordes of zombies on live television. Instead of the planned "morale and confidence boosting victory", the entire country was shown that even if the US military concentrated most of its power, both numerically and technologically, against the zombies, the zombies would win. Adding to this was the irresponsible, "news as big business" culture in America at the time: even after the initial live transmissions, the big media outlets would continue to constantly rebroadcast footage of the disaster at Yonkers. Instead of broadcasting any coherent or helpful information, such as evacuation plans, anti-zombie tactics, survival techniques, etc. the major news channels simply aired 24 hour looped footage of the Battle of Yonkers over and over again. This hyped up the remaining US population into genuine mass hysteria, and cost many lives that were lost due to lack of any information. It is said that the mass hysteria led to numerous "wannabe Rambos" grabbing what weapons they could and in a wild panic simply shooting that anything that moved; this was said to have caused almost as much damage as the actual zombie attacks. Eventually, after several days, the news channels did begin to give one other message: "Go north!", urging people to drive to Canada, where the cold weather was known to slow the movement of the zombies. However, they did not offer any responsible cold weather survival guides, advice on camping/rationing, what stockpiles to take along, etc.; nothing other than literally telling people to physically just jump into their cars and blindly drive northwards. As a result, many who managed to outrun the zombies and reach the Canadian subarctic simply froze or starved to death, and cannibalism soon set in. In the following months, 11 million people would die from starvation and exposure in the Canadian subarctic. Date It is stated in the book that the initial zombie outbreaks (before the first winter, when Phalanx was still being used) happened during an election year in the United States, and that it was four years after a previous president had been in office for eight years, and the current administration had been trying to "clean up the mess" from the "last brushfire war" for the past four years, so they were unwilling to fully mobilize the United States' military forces for what at the time seemed like an implausible threat. It is heavily implied that author Max Brooks is referring to the Iraq War and the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, after which another president was in office for four years; the outbreak began (in China and soon other parts of the world) in 2012, when Bush's successor was facing re-election. The Battle of Yonkers took place the August after these November elections. Thus, the battle took place according to Brook's future time line, in August 2013. It would be another 10 years before North America was "liberated", cleared from zombie infestations, and Victory in China day was declared two years after that; China was the last major country to be cleared of zombies. Notes